Stubborn Attachments: A Vision for a Society of Free, Prosperous, and Responsible Individuals

by Tyler Cowen

Growth is good. Through history, economic growth in particular has alleviated human misery, improved human happiness and opportunity, and lengthened human lives. Wealthier societies are more stable, offer better living standards, produce better medicines, and ensure greater autonomy, greater fulfillment, and more sources of fun. If we want to sustain our trends of growth, and the overwhelmingly positive outcomes for societies that come with it, every individual must become more concerned with the welfare of those around us.

We need to develop a tougher, more dedicated, and indeed a more stubborn attachment to prosperity and freedom.

I treat questions of right and wrong as having correct answers,

Relativism is a nonstarter, and most people are not sincere in their relativist pronouncements anyway. At some gut level, relativists still they think they know right from wrong; if you doubt this, watch them lecture their kids or, better yet, criticize their colleagues.

So, as we consider the realm of politics, we should not engage in the sport of building a coalition of like-minded individuals, defeating competing coalitions, and then implementing as law that which we already know to be best.

If we are building principles for politics, we need approaches which are relatively fortified against human error and the rampant human tendency for self-deception, and which can transcend our own tendencies for excessive “us vs. them” thinking.

Next, I hold pluralism as a core moral intuition. What’s good about an individual human life can’t be boiled down to any single value. It’s not all about beauty or all about justice or all about happiness. Pluralist theories are more plausible, postulating a variety of relevant values, including human well-being, justice, fairness, beauty, the artistic peaks of human achievement, the quality of mercy, and the many different and, indeed, sometimes contrasting kinds of happiness.

If a policy harms human well-being, on net, it has a high hurdle to overcome. If “doing the right thing” does not create a better world in terms of well-being on a repeated basis, we should begin to wonder whether our conception of “the right thing” makes sense. That said, human well-being is not always an absolute priority—thus

In short, my philosophical starting points are: “Right” and “wrong” are very real concepts which should possess great force. We should be skeptical about the powers of the individual human mind. Human life is complex and offers many different goods, not just one value that trumps all others. With this in mind, let’s now turn to the question of choice. When it comes to choice, I see some key questions for the individual as well as the collective. Why do we prefer one choice over another? To what extent do we have good reasons for such preferences? Exactly which choices should we make?

for instance the Arrow and Sen impossibility theorems, which suggest that aggregation problems are very difficult to solve and are perhaps altogether intractable.

When we decide whether and when to break a given rule, we’re back to judging individual cases, which is what rules were supposed to get us away from in the first place.

But does the doctrine of rule utilitarianism (or rule consequentialism) collapse into act utilitarianism?

remains: how can we use our epistemic modesty to make better choices?

First, I do not take the productive powers of economies for granted. Production could be much greater than it is today, and our lives could be more splendid. Or, if we make some big mistakes, production could be much lower, and we could all be much poorer. This simple observation allows us to put the idea of production at the center of our moral theory, because without production, value is problematic.

It is the work of capital, labor, and natural resources, driven by the creative individual mind, which undergird the achievements of our civilization.

Economist Frank Knight wrote of the Crusonia plant, a mythical, automatically growing crop which generates more output each period.

So, in a social setting, what might count as analogous to a Crusonia plant? Look for social processes which are ongoing, self-sustaining, and which create rising value over time. The natural candidate for such a process is economic growth, or some modified version of that concept.

I will use the concept somewhat differently, postulating that GDP should properly be measured in terms of maximizing the long-term rate of economic growth.

Wealth Plus: The total amount of value produced over a certain time period. This includes the traditional measures of economic value found in GDP statistics, but also includes measures of leisure time, household production, and environmental amenities, as summed up in a relevant measure of wealth.

The Shah of Iran, for instance, tried to bring his country into the modern age very rapidly. Growth rates were high for a while but in the longer run could not be maintained. Since the Iranian Revolution, Iran’s economy has backslid.

since the collapse of the Roman Empire, the average duration of a civilization has been only 304.5 years.

What can we do to boost the rate of economic growth? What can we do to make our civilization more stable? How should we deal with environmental problems?

In reality, the U.S. standard of living has increased by a factor of five to seven, estimated conservatively, and possibly much more, depending on how we measure prices and the values of outputs over time, a highly inexact science.

The data show just how much living standards have gone up. In 1900, for instance, almost half of all U.S. households (forty-nine percent) had more than one occupant per room and almost one quarter (twenty-three percent) had over 3.5 persons per sleeping room. Slightly less than one quarter (twenty-four percent) of all U.S. households had running water, eighteen percent had refrigerators, and twelve percent had gas or electric lighting. Today, the figures for all of these stand at ninety-nine percent or higher.

In the mid-nineteenth century, a typical worker might have put in somewhere between 2,800 and 3,300 hours of work a year; that estimate is now closer to 1,400 to 2,000 hours a year.

In 1880, about four-fifths of individuals’ discretionary time was spent working, according to economist Robert Fogel. Today we spend about fifty-nine percent of our time doing what we like, and that may rise to seventy-five percent by 2040.

Both India and Israel have developed vibrant technology and software scenes precisely because of their close ties with the start-up scene of the United States.

One study predicts that if the leading twenty-one industrial countries were to boost their R&D by half a percentage point of GDP, U.S. output alone would grow by fifteen percent. But it doesn’t end there: output in Canada and Italy would grow by about twenty-five percent, and the output of all industrial nations would increase by 17.5 percent, on average. In the less economically developed countries, output would increase by about 10.6 percent on average.

To be sure, there were probably better policies which, had they been adopted, would have distributed the benefits of growth more widely (e.g., fewer wars and Poor Law reform and free trade for the British). But even taking misguided policies into account, Britain fared better by pursuing economic growth rather than turning its back on the idea, even though significant real wage gains for the working class often did not arrive until the 1840s.

Robert E. Lucas, Nobel Laureate in Economics, put the point succinctly: “The consequences for human welfare involved in questions like these are staggering: once one starts to think about [exponential growth], it is hard to think about anything else.”

Benjamin M. Friedman, in his brilliant The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth, shows just how many of the virtues of the modern world depend on higher and indeed growing levels of wealth.

Recent research suggests that wealth boosts happiness and that this holds true for a great variety of people, including for the relatively wealthy, who are already meeting their basic needs. Economists Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers, in the most comprehensive study of the income-happiness link to date, find that the relationship between measured well-being and income is roughly linear-log,

An older body of literature suggests that additional riches do not make citizens in wealthy countries any happier, at least not above a certain level of wealth. The core evidence here is taken from questionnaires that ask people how happy they are. Once a country has a per capita income of somewhat above $10,000 a year or more in current U.S. dollars, the aggregate income-happiness link appears weak to many observers. Some commentators argue that the curve flattens out at about half of current American per capita income. These results cast doubt upon whether economic growth does in fact yield ongoing benefits in terms of happiness.19

To give an example, if you ask the people of Kenya how happy they are with their health, you’ll get a pretty high rate of reported satisfaction, not so different from the rate in the healthier countries, and in fact higher than the reported rate of satisfaction in the United States.

if anything, it may be easier to recalibrate your language than to recalibrate your expectations of happiness.

This means more new gadgets, more entertaining videos, and more serendipitous encounters with interesting new people. That sounds a bit superficial, and indeed it is, but it is yet another reason why economic growth will boost happiness in its more complex and plural forms.

Extra wealth also serves as a cushion against very bad events, or at least against later declines in wealth. Ten or fifteen years ago, it was common to hear the claim that once a nation reaches the level of material wealth found in Greece, happiness more or less flatlines. Indeed, this was more or less where the flatlining point seemed to be. Yet since the Greek economic crisis, dating from 2009, no one uses the Greek example to make a point about the flatlining of the happiness-income relationship. The country lost almost a quarter of its economic output, unemployment has risen to over twenty percent, there have been riots in the streets, a neo-Nazi party was elected to the legislature, and at times basic medicines have been unavailable. Having some additional reserves of wealth prior to the crisis would have helped the country a good deal, and might have prevented the troubles altogether by easing debt repayment.

But once we consider happiness and well-being as relevant features for comparing one choice to another, Arrow’s impossibility theorem does not hold. Arrow’s original theorem assumes, and has to assume, that “happiness talk” (e.g., cardinal, interpersonal utility information) is absent from the comparisons of social states. Think of Arrow’s theorem as looking only at the kind of information which can be reflected in observed votes or ordinal rankings.

South Korea is much better off than, say, the Democratic Republic of Congo by a considerable margin. The higher growth alternative will eventually offer a clear and ongoing preponderance of plural values in its favor, whether it be living standards, women’s rights, freedom of choice, the fight against poverty, or other important values. So why not choose that option and recognize that we have rational grounds for preferring it?

Preferences as expressed in the marketplace often appear irrational, intransitive, spiteful, or otherwise morally dubious, as evidenced by a wide range of vices, from cravings for refined sugar to pornography to grossly actuarially unfair lottery tickets. Given these human imperfections, why should the concept of satisfying preferences be so important? Even if you are willing to rationalize or otherwise defend some of these choices, in many cases it seems obvious that satisfying preferences does not make people happier and does not make the world a better place. Focusing on the long-term benefits of growth sidesteps such dilemmas.

Yet at the same time, living in a much wealthier society—even one rife with fast food—is still good for most people, including good for their health. For all the talk about America’s obesity problem, which is indeed real, life expectancy is still rising with wealth. Indeed, it is wealthy and well-educated people who are most likely to be thin or to succeed in their diets.

The Principle of Growth: We should maximize the rate of sustainable economic growth, defined in terms of a concept such as Wealth Plus.

The Principle of Growth Plus Rights: Inviolable human rights, where applicable, should constrain the quest for higher economic growth.

presence of Crusonia plants means that rights—if we are going to believe in them at all—have to be tough and pretty close to absolute in importance if they are to survive as relevant to our comparisons.

Philosopher Robert Nozick wrote of rights as “side constraints.” The particular specification of these side constraints need not coincide with Nozick’s libertarian vision, and need not coincide with his absolute attachment to all forms of private property or his prohibition of most forms of taxation. Still, these rights will satisfy Nozick’s notion of rights as restrictions on the choice set of an individual or an institution.

Some of us might recoil in horror at the notion of a life, or a society, in which everything is governed by strict rules without exceptions. But fear not—rules will not acquire such extreme powers, because most rules are not as important as the growth maximization rule.

By definition, the rule is telling us to follow outcomes with a preponderance of benefits over costs

If the time horizon is sufficiently long, the only non-growth–related values that will bind practical decisions are the absolute side constraints, or the inviolable human rights. In other words, the dual ideals of prosperity and liberty will be central to ethics

In other words, individual time preference usually focuses on the immediate vs. the only somewhat distant.

For the most part, we’re actually fairly rational about time, except for this fixation on the “now” moment and the “very soon/right away” horizon.